The DOI matches its Crossref record; 52 of the 52 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Ocean submesoscales as a key component of the global heat budget
Open accessAbstract
Recent studies highlight that oceanic motions associated with horizontal scales smaller than 50 km, defined here as submesoscales, lead to anomalous vertical heat fluxes from colder to warmer waters. This unique transport property is not captured in climate models that have insufficient resolution to simulate these submesoscale dynamics. Here, we use an ocean model with an unprecedented resolution that, for the first time, globally resolves submesoscale heat transport. Upper-ocean submesoscale turbulence produces a systematically-upward heat transport that is five times larger than mesoscale heat transport, with winter-time averages up to 100 W/m 2 for mid-latitudes. Compared to a lower-resolution model, submesoscale heat transport warms the sea surface up to 0.3 °C and produces an upward annual-mean air–sea heat flux anomaly of 4–10 W/m 2 at mid-latitudes. These results indicate that submesoscale dynamics are critical to the transport of heat between the ocean interior and the atmosphere, and are thus a key component of the Earth’s climate.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Oceanic vertical mixing: A review and a model with a nonlocal boundary layer parameterization
Large, W. G., McWilliams, J. C., & Doney, S. C. (1994) · Reviews of Geophysics · doi:10.1029/94rg01872 · Cited by 4,443
The global climatology of an interannually varying air-sea flux data set.
Large, W. G., & Yeager, S. G. (2009) · Climate Dynamics · doi:10.1007/s00382-008-0441-3 · Cited by 1,636
Lindzen, R. S., & Nigam, S. (1987) · Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences · doi:10.1175/1520-0469(1987)044<2418:otross>2.0.co;2 · Cited by 1,466
Diurnal to decadal global forcing for ocean and sea-ice models: The data sets and flux climatologies
Large, W. G., & Yeager, S. G. (2004) · doi:10.5065/d6kk98q6 · Cited by 1,089
Submesoscale currents in the ocean
McWilliams, J. C. (2016) · Proceedings of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences · doi:10.1098/rspa.2016.0117 · Cited by 1,081
Objectively Analyzed Air–Sea Heat Fluxes for the Global Ice-Free Oceans (1981–2005)
Yu, L., & Weller, R. A. (2007) · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society · doi:10.1175/bams-88-4-527 · Cited by 1,063
Parameterization of Mixed Layer Eddies. Part I: Theory and Diagnosis
Fox-Kemper, B., Ferrari, R., & Hallberg, R. (2008) · Journal of Physical Oceanography · doi:10.1175/2007jpo3792.1 · Cited by 802
Influence of the Gulf Stream on the troposphere
Minobe, S., Kuwano-Yoshida, A., Komori, N., Xie, S.-P., & Small, R. J. (2008) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature06690 · Cited by 771
Capet, X., McWilliams, J. C., Molemaker, M. J., & Shchepetkin, A. F. (2008) · Journal of Physical Oceanography · doi:10.1175/2007jpo3671.1 · Cited by 727
Mixed Layer Instabilities and Restratification
Boccaletti, G., Ferrari, R., & Fox-Kemper, B. (2007) · Journal of Physical Oceanography · doi:10.1175/jpo3101.1 · Cited by 685
Metadata
- Authors
- Su, Z., Wang, J., Klein, P., Thompson, A. F., & Menemenlis, D.
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2018-02-22
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 775-775
- ISSN
- 2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2793995363
- Cited by
- 469
- References
- 52
- FWCI
- 25.87
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Ocean submesoscales as a key component of the global heat budget. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/s41467-018-02983-w
- The paper
- Su, Z., Wang, J., Klein, P., Thompson, A. F., & Menemenlis, D. (2018). Ocean submesoscales as a key component of the global heat budget. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-018-02983-w
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
